On Sun, Dec 12, 2021, at 9:03 PM, Mallika wrote: > I'm a little confused about how all the and's and or's combine (I suppose > it's obvious if you're a little more familiar with the material - but it > would be great if it were possible to express this by indentation),
It's a relatively confusing state of affairs. An unordered list might help. > but I'd actually decided to write in just to clarify that first line: > "started without non-option arguments," > > Does "option arguments" mean "option*al* arguments"? No. While all option arguments happen to be optional, not all optional arguments are options. An "option argument", roughly speaking, is an argument that begins with one or two hyphen-minuses and affects the configuration of the invoked shell. They are described here: https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/html_node/Invoking-Bash.html > If the double-negative* is *actually correct, wouldn't the same sentiment > be expressed by "started with only option(al?) arguments"? Double-negatives > are inherently confusing, so it would be helpful to avoid them. Something like "with only option arguments" could easily be misunderstood as "with one or more option arguments". -- vq
